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For Philip and for
my family
Part One
Stasha
Chapter One
World After World
We were made, once. My twin, Pearl,
and me. Or, to be precise, Pearl was
formed and I split from her. She
embossed herself on the womb; I copied
her signature. For eight months we were
afloat in amniotic snowfall, two rosy
mittens resting on the lining of our
mother. I couldn’t imagine anything
grander than the womb we shared, but
after the scaffolds of our brains were
ivoried and our spleens were complete,
Pearl wanted to see the world beyond
us. And so, with newborn pluck, she spat
herself out of our mother.
Though premature, Pearl was a
sophisticated prankster. I assured myself
that it was just one of her tricks; she’d
be back to laugh at me. But when Pearl
failed to return, I lost my breath. Have
you ever had to live with the best part of
yourself adrift, stationed at some
unknowable distance? If so, I am sure
you are aware of the dangers of this
condition. After my breath left me, my
heart followed suit, and my brain ran
with an unthinkable fever. In my fetal
pinkness, I faced this truth: without her, I
would become a split and unworthy
thing, a human incapable of love.
That is why I followed my sister’s
lead and allowed the doctor’s hands to
tear me out and smack me and hold me to
the light. Let us note that I never cried
during the ruptures of this unwanted
transition. Not even when our parents
ignored my wish to be named Pearl too.
I became Stasha instead. And with the
chore of birth complete, we entered the
world of family and piano and book, of
days that baffled by in beauty. We were
so alike—we were always dropping
marbles from the window onto the
paving stones and watching them
descend the hill with our binoculars, just
to see how far their little lives would
take them.
That world, teeming with awe, ended
too. Most worlds do.
But I must tell you: There was
another world we knew. Some say it
was the world that made us the most. I
want to say that they are wrong, but for
now, let me tell you that our entry into
this world began in our twelfth year of
life, when we were huddled side by side
in the back of a cattle car.
During that journey of four days and
four nights, we cheated our way into
survival under Mama’s and Zayde’s
instruction. For sustenance, we passed
an onion back and forth and licked its
yellow hide. For entertainment, we
played the game Zayde made for us, a
game called the Classification of Living
Things. In this form of charades, you had
to portray a living thing, and the players
had to name the species, the genus, the
family, and so on, all the way to the
encompassing brilliance of a kingdom.
The four of us passed through so
many living things in the cattle car; we
postured from bear to snail and back—it
was important, Zayde emphasized in his
thirst-cracked voice, that we organize
the universe to the best of our too-human
ability—and when the cattle car finally
came to a stop I stopped my charade too.
The way I remember it, I was in the
middle of trying to convince Mama that I
was an amoeba. It’s possible that I was
portraying some other living thing and
that I am remembering it as an amoeba
now only because I felt so small in that
moment, so translucent and fragile. I
cannot be sure.
Just as I was about to admit defeat,
the door to the cattle car rolled open.
And the incoming light was so
startling that we dropped our onion on
the floor, and it rolled down the ramp, a
smelly and half-eaten moon that landed
at the feet of a guard. I imagine that his
face was full of disgust, but I couldn’t
see it—he held a kerchief over his
nostrils while issuing a series of
sneezes, and he stopped sneezing only to
hover his boot above our onion and cast
an eclipsing shadow over the tiny globe.
We watched the onion weep as he
crushed it, its tears a bitter pulp. He then
resumed his approach, and we
scrambled to hide in the shelter of
Zayde’s voluminous coat. Though we
had outgrown Zayde as a hiding place
long ago, fear made us smaller, and we
contorted within the coat folds beside
his dwindled body, leaving our
grandfather a lumpy, many-legged figure.
In this shelter, we blinked. Then we
heard a sound—a stomp, a shuffle—the
guard’s boots were immediately before
us.
“What kind of insect are you?” he
asked Zayde, rapping each of the girlish
legs that emerged beneath the coat with a
walking stick. Our knees smarted. Then
the guard struck Zayde’s legs too. “Six
legs? You are a spider?”
It was clear that the guard had no real
understanding of living things at all.
Already, he’d made two errors. But
Zayde didn’t bother to point out that
spiders aren’t insects and that, in fact,
they are possessors of eight legs.
Traditionally, Zayde enjoyed issuing
playful, singsong corrections, as he liked
to see all the facts put to rights. In that
place, though—it was too dangerous to
express any intimate knowledge of
creatures that crawled or were
considered lowly, lest you be accused of
bearing too much in common with them.
We should have known better than to
make an insect of our grandfather.
“I asked you a question,” the guard
insisted while issuing another rap to our
legs with his stick. “What kind?”
In German, Zayde gave him facts: His
name was Tadeusz Zamorski. He was
sixty-five years old. He was a Polish
Jew. He ended there, as if all were told.
And we wanted to continue for him,
we wanted to give all the details: Zayde
was a former professor of biology. He’d
taught the subject at universities for
decades but was an expert in many
things. If you wanted to know about the
insides of a poem, he would be the one
to ask. If you wanted to know how to
walk on your hands or find a star, he’d
show you. With him, we once saw a
rainbow that ran only red, saw it
straddle a mountain and a sea, and he
toasted the memory of it often. To
unbearable beauty! he’d cry, eyes
abrim. He was so fond of toasts that he
made them indiscriminately, for nearly
any occasion. To a morning swim! To
the lindens at the gate! And in recent
years, there was this, his most common
toast: To the day my son returns, alive
and unchanged!
But as much as we would have liked
to, we said nothing of these things to the
guard—the details caught in our throats,
and our eyes were tearful because of the
death of the nearby onion. The tears
were the onion’s fault, we told
ourselves, nothing more, and we wiped
the drops away so that we could see
what was happening through the holes in
Zayde’s coat.
Encircled in the portholes of these
flaws were five figures: three little boys,
their mother, and a white-coated man
who stood with a pen cocked over a
little book. The boys intrigued us—we’d
never seen triplets before. In Lodz, there
had been another set of girl twins, but a
trio was the stuff of books. Though we
were impressed by their number, we had
to admit that we trumped them in terms
of identicality. All three had the same
dark curls and eyes, the same spindly
bodies, but they wore different
expressions—one squinted at the sun,
while the other two frowned, and their
faces fell into similarity only when the
white-coated man distributed candy into
each of their palms.
The triplets’ mother was different
than all the other mothers of the cattle
car—her distress was neatly tucked
away, and she stood as still as a stopped
clock. One of her hands drifted over her
sons’ heads in some perpetual hesitation,
as if she felt that she no longer had the
right to touch them. The white-coated
man did not share this attitude.
He was an intimidating figure, all
shiny black shoes and dark hair of equal
polish, his sleeves so expansive that
when he lifted an arm, the fabric below
billowed and winged and claimed a
disproportionate measure of sky. He was
movie-star handsome and prone to
dramatics; kindly expressions swelled
across his face with obviousness, as if
he was eager to let everyone near know
the extremity of his good intentions.
Words passed between the mother
and the white-coated man. They seemed
like agreeable words, though the man
did most of the talking. We wished we
could hear the conversation, but it was
enough, I suppose, to see what happened
next: the mother passed her hands over
the dark clouds of the triplets’ hair, and
then she turned her back, leaving the
boys with the white-coated man.
He was a doctor, she said as she
walked away, a falter in her step. They
would be safe, she assured them, and she
did not look back.
Our mother, hearing this, gave a little
squeak and a gasp before reaching over
to tug at the guard’s arm. Her boldness
was a shock. We were used to a
trembling mother, one who always shook
while making requests of the butcher and
hid from the cleaning woman. Always, it
was as if pudding ran through her veins,
making her constantly aquiver and
defeatable, especially since Papa’s
disappearance. In the cattle car, she’d
steadied herself only by drawing a
poppy on the wooden wall. Pistil, petal,
stamen—she drew with a strange focus,
and when she stopped drawing, she went
to pieces. But on the ramp she
discovered a new solidity—she stood
stronger than the starved and weary
should ever stand. Was the music
responsible for this alteration? Mama
always loved music, and this place was
teeming with bright notes; they found us
in the cattle car and drew us out with a
distrustful cheer. Over time, we’d learn
the depths of this trick and know to
beware of the celebratory tune, as it held
only suffering at its core. The orchestra
had been entrusted with the deception of
all that entered. They were compelled,
these musicians, to use their talents to
ensnare the unwitting, to convince them
that where they had arrived was a place
not entirely without an appreciation for
the humane and the beautiful. Music—it
uplifted the arriving crowds, it flowed
beside them as they walked through the
gates. Was this why Mama was able to
be bold? I would never know. But I
admired her courage as she spoke.
“It is good here—to be a double?”
she asked the guard.
He gave her a nod and turned to the
doctor, who was squatting in the dust so
that he could address the boys at eye
level. The group appeared to be having
the warmest of chats.
“Zwillinge!” the guard called to him.
“Twins!”
The doctor left the triplets to a female
attendant and strode over to us, his shiny
boots disrupting the dust. He was courtly
with our mother, taking her hand as he
addressed her.
“You have special children?” His
eyes were friendly, from what we could
see.
Mama shifted from foot to foot,
suddenly diminished. She tried to
withdraw her hand from his grasp but he
held it tight, and then he began to stroke
her palm with his gloved fingertips, as if
it were some wounded, but easily
soothed, thing.
“Only twins, not triplets,” she
apologized. “I hope they are enough.”
The doctor’s laugh was loud and
showy and it echoed within the caverns
of Zayde’s coat. We were relieved when
it subsided so that we could listen to
Mama rattling off our gifts.
“They speak some German. Their
father taught them. They’ll turn thirteen
in December. Healthy readers, the both
of them. Pearl loves music—she is
quick, practical, studies dance. Stasha,
my Stasha”—here Mama paused, as if
unsure how to categorize me, and then
declared—“she has an imagination.”
The doctor received this information
with interest, and requested that we join
him on the ramp.
We hesitated. It was better within the
suffocations of the coat. Outside, there
was a gray, flame-licked wind that
alerted us to our grief, and a scorched
scent that underpinned it; there were
guns casting shadows and dogs barking
and drooling and growling as only dogs
bred for cruelty can. But before we had
a chance to withdraw farther, the doctor
pulled aside the curtains of the coat. In
the sunlight, we blinked. One of us
snarled. It might have been Pearl. It was
probably me.
How could it be, the doctor
marveled, that these perfect features
could be wasted on such dour
expressions? He drew us out, made us
turn for him, and had us stand back to
back so he could appreciate the
exactitudes of us.
“Smile!” he instructed.
Why did we obey this particular
order? For our mother’s sake, I suppose.
For her, we grinned, even as she clung to
Zayde’s arm, her face lit with panic, two
drops of sweat tripping down her
forehead. Ever since we’d entered the
cattle car, I’d avoided looking at our
mother. I looked at the poppy she drew
instead; I focused on the fragile bloom of
its face. But something about her false
expression made me acknowledge what
Mama had become: a pretty but
sleepless semi-widow, faded in her
personhood. Once the primmest of
women, she was undone; dust streaked
her cheek, her lace collar lay limp. Dull
gems of blood secured themselves to the
corners of her lips where she’d gnawed
on them in worry.
“They are mischlinge?” he asked.
“That yellow hair!”
Mama pulled at her dark curls, as if
ashamed of their beauty, and shook her
head.
“My husband—he was fair” was all
she could say. It was the only answer she
had when asked about the coloring that
made certain onlookers insist that our
blood was mixed. As we’d grown, that
word mischling—we heard it more and
more, and its use in our presence had
inspired Zayde to give us the
Classification of Living Things. Never
mind this Nuremberg abomination, he’d
say. He’d tell us to ignore this talk of
mixed breeds, crossed genetics, of
quarter-Jews and kindred, these absurd,
hateful tests that tried to divide our
people down to the last blood drop and
marriage and place of worship. When
you hear that word, he’d say, dwell on
the variation of all living things. Sustain
yourself, in awe of this.
I knew then, standing before the
white-coated doctor, that this advice
would be difficult to take in the days to
come, that we were in a place that did
not answer to Zayde’s games.
“Genes, they are funny things, yes?”
the doctor was saying.
Mama, she didn’t even try to engage
him in this line of conversation.
“If they go with you”—and here she
would not look at us—“when will we
see them again?”
“On your Sabbath,” the doctor
promised. And then he turned to us and
exclaimed over our details—he loved
that we spoke German, he said, he loved
that we were fair. He didn’t love that our
eyes were brown, but this, he remarked
to the guard, could prove useful—he
leaned in still closer to inspect us,
extending a gloved hand to stroke my
sister’s hair.
“So you’re Pearl?” His hand dipped
through her curls too easily, as if it had
done so for years.
“She’s not Pearl,” I said. I stepped
forward to obscure my sister, but Mama
pulled me away and told the doctor that,
indeed, he had named the right girl.
“So they like to play tricks?” He
laughed. “Tell me your secret—how do
you know who is who?”
“Pearl doesn’t fidget” was all Mama
would say. I was grateful that she didn’t
elaborate on our identifiable differences.
Pearl wore a blue pin in her hair. I wore
red. Pearl spoke evenly. My speech was
rushed, broken in spots, riddled with
pause. Pearl’s skin was as pale as a
dumpling. I had summer flesh, as spotty
as a horse. Pearl was all girl. I wanted
to be all Pearl, but try as I might, I could
only be myself.
The doctor stooped to me so that we
could be face to face.
“Why would you lie?” he asked me.
Again, there was his laugh, tinged with
the familial.
If I was honest, I would have said that
Pearl was—to my mind—the weaker of
the two of us, and I thought I could
protect her if I became her. Instead, I
gave him a half-truth.
“I forget which one I am sometimes,”
I said lamely.
And this is where I don’t remember.
This is where I want to wander my mind
back and under, past the smell, past the
thump-bump of the boots and the
suitcases, toward some semblance of a
good-bye. Because we should have seen
our loves go missing, we should have
been able to watch them leave us, should
have known the precise moment of our
loss. If only we’d seen their faces
turning from us, a flash of eye, a curve of
cheek! A face turning—they would never
give us that. Still, why couldn’t we have
had a view of their backs to carry with
us, just their backs as they left, only that?
Just a glimpse of shoulder, a flash of
woolen coat? For the sight of Zayde’s
hand, hanging so heavy at his side—for
Mama’s braid, lifting in the wind!
But where our loved ones should
have been, we had only the introduction
to this white-coated man, Josef Mengele,
the same Mengele who would become,
in all his many years of hiding, Helmut
Gregor, G. Helmuth, Fritz Ulmann, Fritz
Hollman,
Jose
Mengele,
Peter
Hochbicler, Ernst Sebastian Alves, Jose
Aspiazi, Lars Balltroem, Friedrich Edler
von Breitenbach, Fritz Fischer, Karl
Geuske, Ludwig Gregor, Stanislaus
Prosky, Fausto Rindon, Fausto Rondon,
Gregor Schklastro, Heinz Stobert, and
Dr. Henrique Wollman.
The man who would bury his deathdealing within these many names—he
told us to call him Uncle Doctor. He
made us call him by this name, once,
then twice, just so we could all be
acquainted, with no mistakes. By the
time we finished repeating the name to
his satisfaction, our family had vanished.
And when we saw the absence where
Mama and Zayde once stood, an
awareness collapsed me at the knees,
because I saw that this world was
inventing a different order of living
things. I did not know then what kind of
living thing I would become, but the
guard didn’t let me have a chance to
think about it—he grasped my arm and
dragged me till Pearl assured him that
she’d support me, and she put her arm
around my waist as we were led away
with the triplets, away from the ramp
and into the dust, onto a little road that
led past the sauna and toward the
crematoria, and as we marched into this
new distance with death rising up on
either side of us, we saw bodies on a
cart, saw them heaped and blackened,
and one of the bodies—it was reaching
out its hand, it was grasping for
something to hold, as if there were some
invisible tether in the air that only the
near-dead could see. The body’s mouth
moved. We saw the pinkness of a tongue
as it flapped and struggled. Words had
abandoned it.
I knew how important words were to
a life. If I gave the body some of mine, I
thought, it would be restored.
Was I stupid to think this? Or
feebleminded? Would the thought have
occurred to me in a place free of flamelicked winds and white-winged doctors?
These are fair questions. I think of
them often, but I have never tried to
answer them. The answers don’t belong
to me.
All I know: I stared at the body, and
the only words I could summon weren’t
my own. They were from a song I’d
heard played on a smuggled record
player in our ghetto basement. Whenever
I’d heard the song, it had improved me.
So I gave these words a try.
“‘Would you like to swing on a
star?’” I sang to the body.
Not a sound, not a stir. Was it the fault
of my squeaky voice? I tried again.
“‘Carry moonbeams home in a jar?’”
I sang.
It was pathetic of me to try, I know,
but I had always believed in the world’s
ability to right itself, just like that, with a
single kindness. And when kindness is
not around, you invent new orders and
systems to believe in, and there, in that
moment—whether it was stupidity or
feeblemindedness—I believed in a
body’s ability to animate itself with the
breath of a word. But it was obvious that
these lyrics were not the right words at
all. None of them could unlock the life of
the body or were powerful enough to
repair it. I searched for another word, a
good word, to give—there had to be a
word, I was sure of it—but the guard
wouldn’t let me finish. He pulled me
away and forced us to press on, anxious
to have us showered and processed and
numbered so that our time in Mengele’s
zoo could begin.
Auschwitz was built to imprison us.
Birkenau was built to kill us. Mere
kilometers bridged their attached evils.
What this zoo was designed for, I did not
know—I could only swear that Pearl and
I, we would never be caged.
The barracks of the Zoo were once
stables for horses, but now they were
heaped with the likes of us: twins,
triplets, quints. Hundreds upon hundreds
of us, all packed into beds that weren’t
beds but matchboxes, little slots to slip
bodies into; we were piled from floor to
ceiling, forced into these minute
structures three or four bodies at a time
so that a girl hardly knew where her
body ended and another’s began.
Everywhere we looked there was a
duplicate, an identical. All girls. Sad
girls, toddler girls, girls from faraway
places, girls who could have been our
neighborhood’s girls. Some of these
girls were quiet; they posed like birds
on their straw mattresses and studied us.
As we walked past them on their
perches, I saw the chosen, the ones
selected to suffer in certain ways while
their other halves remained untouched.
In nearly every pair, one twin had a
spine gone awry, a bad leg, a patched
eye, a wound, a scar, a crutch.
When Pearl and I sat on our own
bunk, the mobile ones descended on us.
They scrambled over the rickety corrals
with their straw mattresses and
appraised our similarities. Demands of
our identities were made.
We were from Lodz, we told them.
First, a house. Then, a basement in the
ghetto. We had a grandpapa, a mother.
Once, there had been a father. And
Zayde had an old spaniel that could play
dead when you pointed a finger at him,
but he was easily brought back to life.
Did we mention that our father was a
doctor who helped others so much that
he disappeared one night, that he left us
to tend to a sick child and never
returned? Yes, we missed him so much
we could not even divide the weight of
our grief between us. There were other
things we dreaded too: germs, unhappy
endings, Mama weeping. And there were
things we loved: pianos, Judy Garland,
Mama weeping less. But who were we
really, in the end? There wasn’t much to
say beyond the fact that one of us was a
good dancer, and the other one tried to
be good but wasn’t really good at
anything except being curious. That one
was me.
Satisfied by this information, the
others offered their own in a clamor of
sentence-finishing.
“We get more food here,” began
Rachel, a girl so pale that you could
nearly see through her.
“But it’s not kosher and it eats your
insides,” her equally transparent half
pointed out.
“We keep our hair,” noted Sharon,
pulling on her braid for show.
“Until the lice come,” added her
shorn sister.
“We get to keep our clothes too,”
contributed one of the Russians.
“But they put crosses on our backs,”
finished her double. She turned so I
could see the cross that blared in red
paint on her dress, but I needed no
illustration. A red cross stood between
my shoulder blades too.
The children hushed abruptly, and the
uninvited silence hung over us all—it
was as if a new cloud had installed itself
within the rafters of the Zoo. The many
doubles looked at each other searchingly
—there had to be something, their faces
said, something more than food and hair
and clothes. Then a voice piped up from
the bunk below us. We craned to see the
speaker, but she and her twin were
curled up together, flush with the brick
wall. We never came to know her face,
but her words stayed with us always.
“They keep our families safe for us,”
said this unseen stranger.
At this, all the girls nodded their
approval, and Pearl and I were
overwhelmed by a new rush of
conversation as everyone congratulated
one another on belonging to families
who would remain intact, unlike so
many.
I didn’t want to ask the obvious. So I
pinched Pearl to make her ask for us.
“Why are we more important than the
others?” Her voice shrank as it
approached the end of the question.
A flurry of answers rose, all having
something to do with purpose and
greatness, with purity and beauty and
being of use. We didn’t hear a single one
that made sense.
And before I could even try to
understand this concept, the blokowa
assigned to look after us entered. Behind
her prodigious back, we called this
person Ox; she had the appearance of a
wardrobe with a toupee and tended
toward foot-stamping and nostril-flaring
when caught in one of her passionate
rants, which our supposed disobedience
frequently inspired. When Pearl and I
were first introduced to her, however,
she was just a figure popping her head in
at the door, half shrouded in night and
offended by our questions.
“Why are we called the Zoo?” I
asked. “Who decided this?”
Ox shrugged. “It is not obvious to
you?”
I said that it was not. The zoos we’d
read about with Zayde were sites of
preservation that presented the vastness
of life. This place, it cared only for the
sinister act of collection.
“It is a name that pleases Dr.
Mengele” was all Ox would say. “You
won’t find many answers here. But
sleep! That’s something you can have.
Now let me have mine!”
If only we could have slept. But the
darkness was darker than any I’d known,
and the smell clung within my nostrils. A
moan drifted from the bunk below, and
outside there was the barking of dogs,
and my stomach wouldn’t stop growling
back at them. I tried to amuse myself by
playing one of our word games, but the
shouts of the guards outside kept
overpowering my alphabet. I tried to
make Pearl play a game with me, but
Pearl was busy tracing her fingertips
over the silver web that embroidered
our brick corner, the better to ignore my
whispered questions.
“Would you rather be a watch that
only knows the good times,” I asked her,
“or a watch that sings?”
“I don’t believe in music anymore.”
“Me neither. But would you rather be
a watch—”
“Why do I have to be a watch at all?
Is this my only choice?”
I wanted to argue that sometimes, as
living things, as human-type people who
were presumably still alive, we had to
treat ourselves as objects in order to get
by; we had to hide ourselves away and
seek repair only when repair was safe to
seek. But I chose to press on with
another query instead.
“Would you rather be the key to a
place that will save us or the weapon
that will destroy our enemies?”
“I’d rather be a real girl,” Pearl said
dully. “Like I used to be.”
I wanted to argue that playing games
would help her feel like a real girl
again, but even I wasn’t sure of this fact.
The numbers the Nazis had given us had
made life unrecognizable, and in the
dark, the numbers were all I could see,
and what was worse was that there was
no way to pretend them into anything
less enduring or severe or blue. Mine
were smudged and bleared—I’d kicked
and spat; they’d had to hold me down—
but they were numbers still. Pearl was
numbered too, and I hated her numbers
even more than mine, because they
pointed out that we were separate
people, and when you are separate
people, you might be parted.
I told Pearl that I’d tattoo us back to
sameness as soon as possible, but she
only sighed the sigh traditional to
moments of sisterly frustration.
“Enough with the stories. You can’t
tattoo.”
I told her that I knew how to well
enough. A sailor taught me, back in
Gdańsk. I’d inked an anchor onto his left
biceps.
True, it was a lie. Or a half-lie, since
I had seen such an anchor-inking take
place. When we’d summered at the sea, I
spent my time peering into the gray
recess of a tattoo parlor, its walls
bordered with outlines of swallows and
ships, while Pearl found a boy to hold
her hand near the barnacled prow of a
boat. So it was that as my sister entered
into the secrecies of flesh on flesh, the
pang of a palm curled within one’s own,
I schooled myself in the intimacies of
needles, the plunge of a point so fine that
only a dream could light upon its tip.
“I’ll make us the same again
someday,” I insisted. “I just need a
needle and some ink. There must be a
way to get that, given that we are special
here.”
Pearl scowled and made a big show
of turning her back to me—the bunk
cried out with a creak—and her elbow
flew up and jabbed me in the ribs. It was
an accident—Pearl would never hurt me
on purpose, if only because it would hurt
her too. That was one of the biggest
stings of this sisterhood—pain never
belonged to just one of us. We had no
choice but to share our sufferings, and I
knew that in this place we’d have to find
a way to divide the pain before it began
to multiply.
As I realized this, a girl on the other
side of the room found a light, a precious
book of matches, and she decided that
this scarcity would be best put to use
making shadow puppets for the audience
of multiples. And so it was that we
drifted off to sleep with a series of
shadow figures crossing the wall,
walking two by two, each flanking the
other, as if in a procession toward some
unseen ark that might secure their safety.
So much world in the shadows there!
The figures feathered and crept and
crawled toward the ark. Not a single life
was too small. The leech asserted itself,
the centipede sauntered, the cricket sang
by. Representatives of the swamp, the
mountain, the desert—all of them ducked
and squiggled and forayed in shadow. I
classified them, two by two, and the
neatness of my ability to do so gave me
comfort. But as their journey lengthened,
and the flames began to dim, the
shadows were visited by distortions.
Humps rose on their backs, and their
limbs scattered and their spines
dissolved. They became changed and
monstrous. They couldn’t recognize
themselves.
Still, for as long as the light lived, the
shadows endured. That was something,
wasn’t it?
Pearl
Chapter Two
Zugangen, or
Newcomers
Stasha didn’t know it, but always, from
the very beginning, we were more than
we. I was older by only ten minutes, but
it was enough to teach me how different
we were.
It was only in Mengele’s Zoo that we
became too different.
For example: On that first night, the
marching shadows comforted Stasha, but
I could find no peace in them. Because
those matches illuminated another sight,
one accompanied by a death rattle. Did
Stasha mention the dying girl?
We weren’t alone in our bunk that
night. There was a third child with us on
the straw mattress, a feverish, blacktongued mite who curled up beside me
and pressed her cheek to my cheek as
she died. This wasn’t a gesture of
affection—our proximity rose only from
the fact that there wasn’t an inch of room
to be spared in our matchbox beds—but
in the days ahead I found myself often
hoping that this twinless, nameless girl
took some comfort in being close to me.
I had to believe that it was not a lack of
room alone that put her cheek to mine.
When the rattle stopped, the Stepanov
twins, Esfir and Nina, the eleven-yearolds in the bed slot below us, leaped up
to our mattress and stripped the girl of
her clothes. They performed this task
with an unnerving deftness, as if they’d
been undressing corpses all their lives.
Esfir joyously flung a sweater around
her shoulders; Nina shimmied into a
woolen skirt. The disapproval on my
face must’ve been obvious, because
Esfir offered me the girl’s stockings,
thrusting the unraveled, grayed toe
beneath my nose, in a gesture of
appeasement. When I waved this gift
away, she—a veteran, or Old Number—
employed the insult used for us New
Numbers, or newcomers.
“Zugang!” she hissed at me.
If I hadn’t been so lost over the death
beside me, I might have defended
myself, but I cared little at that moment.
The Stepanovs exchanged wily glances
with each other, and then Serafima
winked at me, as if to acknowledge the
great favor she was about to perform on
my behalf. Without a word of negotiation
between them, the two took hold of the
girl’s body by its head and its feet and
slid its meager weight from our bed.
“She can stay.” I reached out and put
a hand on the still-warm chest.
“She is dead,” they argued. “See the
trickle from her mouth? Dead!”
“So? She still needs a place to sleep,
doesn’t she?”
“It’s against our law, zugang.”
“What law?”
They were too busy carting the body
down the ladder to the floor to answer,
their movements illuminated by the same
scant light that produced the shadowy
animals. I wished for utter darkness then.
Because I saw the girl’s eyes fly open as
her body thumped past the rungs and to
the floor. All of the children turned in
their beds so as not to witness the
exodus, but I saw the girl’s hair fan over
the threshold as her bearers dragged her
out, and I tried, as she disappeared from
view, to remember her eyes.
I thought they were brown eyes, as
brown as my own, but our acquaintance
had been so brief, I couldn’t be sure.
All I could be sure of was the
sprightliness of the twins. When they
reappeared at the door, they were
clapping the grime from their hands.
Nina twirled in the skirt, and Esfir
plucked lint from the stolen sweater.
They were enlivened by these new
possessions. Nina ambled over with a
bundle in her hand and tossed it in
Stasha’s direction.
“Take the stockings,” she spat at my
sister. “Don’t act so superior.”
Stasha regarded the stockings where
they lay, so limp and forlorn, in her lap. I
advised her to give them back, but
Stasha had never been good at taking
anyone’s advice, even mine. She thrust
them onto her hands like mittens, much to
Nina’s pleasure.
“You’re resourceful,” Nina said
approvingly before retiring with her
sister to the bunk below, where the two
of them rustled about in their straw like
the scavengers they were, doubtless
planning their next acquisition of goods.
Everyone survived by planning. I
could see that. I realized that Stasha and
I would have to divide the
responsibilities of living between us.
Such divisions had always come
naturally to us, and so there, in the earlymorning dark, we divvied up the
necessities:
Stasha would take the funny, the
future, the bad. I would take the sad, the
past, the good.
There were overlaps between these
categories, but we’d negotiated such
overlaps before. It seemed fair to me,
but when we were done with the
partitioning of these duties, Stasha had
misgivings.
“You got the worse deal,” she said.
“I’ll trade you. I’ll take the past, and you
take the future. The future is more
hopeful.”
“I am happy with the way things are,”
I said.
“Take the future. I already have the
funny—you should have the future. It
will make things more even between
us.”
I thought of all the years we’d spent
trying to match every gesture. When we
were small, we’d practiced walking the
same amount of steps every day,
speaking the same number of words,
smiling the same smiles. I started to
retreat into these memories, but just as
I’d begun to calm, Ox resurrected our
dread. Cool and efficient, a drab figure
in an oatmeal-colored cloak, she picked
her way through the barracks with the
dead child, now clothed in mud, held
aloft in her arms. Wordlessly, she
carried the girl over to our bunk and laid
her back beside me, placing the cold
hands over the concave chest and
crossing the legs at their ankles. Tongue
thrust between her teeth in concentration,
she performed this endeavor with the
manner of one arranging flowers for the
room of a beloved houseguest.
“Who did this?” Ox demanded after
she’d completed her work and the girl
stared sightlessly up at the rafters.
No one would answer, but Ox didn’t
much care for answers, preferring any
opportunity
for
intimidation.
“I
recommend that you children find a
better way to amuse yourselves than by
dumping bodies by the latrines. You all
know that Dr. Mengele requires that
every child in the Zoo must be counted
in the morning. If this body goes missing
again—”
She allowed the possibilities to
dangle in the air, all the better to frighten
us, and then, her mission completed, she
turned and left with a dramatic flap of
oatmeal-colored cloak, pausing only to
confiscate the matches from the girl
making the shadow puppets. All was
dark once more, though not dark enough
to obscure the death that lay beside us.
“She looks hungry even now,” Stasha
observed. She skipped a stockinged
finger across the girl’s still cheek. “Do
you think she has feelings anymore?”
“No one has feelings when they are
dead,” I told her. But I wasn’t quite
convinced of this myself. If there was
ever a place where the dead might still
feel their tortures, it had to be the Zoo.
Stasha took the stockings from her
hands and tried to pull them over the
girl’s feet. First the left foot, then the
right. One stocking crowned at midcalf,
while the other slipped easily over the
knee. Frustrated by this difference,
Stasha tugged at the woolens to make
them align, and I had to point out to her
that the pair were mismatched, that there
was no way to force them into sameness.
Nothing was fixable; we could only
make do.
“Please,” I whispered to Stasha as
her efforts inspired a new hole in one of
the stockings, “let me have the past, and
I’ll take the present too. I just don’t want
the future.”
That was how the role of keeper of
time and memory came to be mine. From
then on, the acknowledgment of days
was my responsibility alone.
September 3, 1944
In our former life, I was used to doing
the talking for us. I had been the outgoing
one, the one with proven methods of
getting us out of trouble, the one who
negotiated exchanges with peers and
authority figures alike. This role suited
me. I was everyone’s friend, and a fair
representative for us both.
We soon found out that Stasha was
better fit for socializing in our new
world. A fearlessness had entered her.
She set her teeth with severity when she
smiled, and she walked with a girlish
approximation of a swagger, like a
movie cowboy or a comic-book hero.
On our first morning, her chatter was
endless. She asked questions of anyone
she could, to try to ease our adjustment.
The first to receive her inquiry was a
man who introduced himself to us as
Zwillingesvater, or Twins’ Father. He
saw us respond to the oddity of this
name with curious faces, but he did not
try to explain it except to say that all of
the children called him this—the Zoo,
we would find, had a habit of assigning
people new names and identities, and
even adults were no exception to this
rule.
“When do we see our families?”
Stasha asked Twins’ Father as he sat on
a crate recording all our facts for
Mengele’s use. We were sitting with him
behind the boys’ barracks with an
irrelevant globe idling at his feet in the
dirt. The travels of this globe—a relic
that was usually kept in the storehouse—
were much envied by us all, as the
object was able to move from camp to
camp, while we remained pinned within
the Zoo. One of the boys—a Peter
Abraham, whom Mengele had dubbed “a
member of the intelligentsia”—served as
one of the doctor’s messengers, and in
this position, he was able to steal this
little globe, to tuck it beneath his coat
and toddle from block to block as if
afflicted with some strange pregnancy.
Peter stole it in the mornings, and in the
evenings, one of the guards stole it back.
In this way, the world was possessed
and repossessed, and over time, it grew
more battered in its travels. Holes
appeared, borders were blurred, whole
countries faded away altogether. Still, it
was a globe, and it tended to be a useful
thing to have around, because during
interviews like these, one could focus on
its surface instead of Twins’ Father’s
face, though I suppose both were equally
worn and discouraged in appearance.
“We see our families on holidays,”
Twins’ Father told her in his patient way.
“Or so Mengele says.”
Twins’ Father was twenty-nine years
old and a veteran of the Czech army. He
carried himself like a soldier still but
had a weariness that was likely
exacerbated by his charges. Impressed
by his military pedigree and German
fluency, Mengele had entrusted him with
overseeing the boys’ barracks and
processing the paperwork of all the
incoming twins, paperwork that was
later sent to the genetics department at
Berlin’s Kaiser Wilhelm Institute.
If it could be said that Mengele ever
did a good thing, that good thing was
appointing Twins’ Father to his post. The
boys loved him; they clung to him as he
taught them lessons—German and
geography, mostly—and he kicked a rag
ball around the soccer field with them in
odd little fits of games. There were
mothers of newborn multiples who were
permitted to live in the Zoo in the
interest of assisting the development of
their babies, and they cooed over Twins’
Father, saying that he would make a fine
head of the family someday, but the man
winced at this praise, and just carried on
in his gentle and resourceful way. We
girls were quite jealous of the boys for
this ally, having only Ox as our
designated authority. We learned nothing
of where we were from Ox. From other
girls in the barracks, we learned that
Mengele’s Zoo had once been near the
Romany camp. But now, the Romanies
were dead, as every last one had been
exterminated on August 2, 1944; their
eradication was seen as a necessity by
camp authorities, who were appalled by
the rampant disease and starvation
among them. This was not a problem of
proper rations—the adults were clearly
withholding food from the children.
Romanies would rather sing and dance
all day than address their filth. All that
could be done with such a people was to
end them.
There were rumors that Mengele tried
to intervene. Whether this was true, no
one knew. We knew only that the
Romanies were gassed, and we, the
twins of Auschwitz, remained. Directly
before our compound, there was an
empty plot of land where the Germans
collected the dead and the near-dead.
This plot filled and emptied in terrible
repetition. This was our immediate
view.
We could also see birches in the
woods beyond the thirteen-foot-high
electric fences. And we could see
women prisoners in the adjacent field; if
the girls saw their mothers among them,
they could throw their bread to them,
hoping that they would not loft it back,
as our rations were greater than anyone
else’s in the camp. We could see the labs
we were taken to on Tuesdays and
Thursdays and Saturdays, the two-story
buildings of brick, but the rest of our
view was limited. If someone had cause
to pluck us up and take us somewhere,
then there was more we might learn of
Auschwitz, but otherwise, we did not
see the section of the camp called
Canada, which featured a series of
warehouses so overwhelmed with
pillaged splendor that the prisoners
named it after a country that represented
wealth and luxury to them. Inside
Canada’s
structures,
our
former
possessions loomed in stacks: our
spectacles, our coats, our instruments,
our suitcases, all of it, even down to our
teeth, our hair, anything that could be
considered necessary to the business of
being human. We did not see the sauna
where inmates were stripped, or the
little white farmhouse whose rooms
were passed off as showers. We did not
see the luxuriant headquarters of the SS,
where parties took place, parties where
the women of the Puff were brought in to
dance and sit upon Nazi laps. We did not
see, and so we believed we already
knew the worst. We couldn’t imagine the
greatness of suffering, how artful and
calculated it could be, how it could
pluck off the members of a family, one
after the other, or show an entire village
the face of death in one fell swoop.
The day after our arrival, Twins’
Father remained efficient and stoic as he
approached our paperwork, but there
were times in which his uncertainties
seemed to surface as he considered the
import of every answer and the effect it
might have on our lives. I watched his
hand waver between one box and
another before imposing a hesitant check
mark.
“Now tell me,” he asked, “which of
you came first?”
“This matters?” Stasha had never
been fond of this question.
“To him, it all matters. My sister
Magda and I, we don’t know who came
first. But we say that I did, just to please
him. So tell me, Pearl, who was first?”
“I was,” I admitted.
As Twins’ Father and I continued
with the details, Stasha directed her
questions to Dr. Miri, who was waiting
to collect the finished paperwork and
deliver it to the laboratory. Dr. Miri was
a beautiful doctor—like a lily, people
were fond of saying, a solemn and
thoughtful kind of flower. She reminded
us of Mama a little, with her dark hair
and too-big eyes and crooked mouth, but
she was more doll-like, and the
expressions that crossed her face often
struck me as very strange because they
were so distant, so far away. They were
not unlike the expressions one might
have while underwater watching
disturbances occur on the waves above.
Even more remarkable than Dr.
Miri’s beauty was the fact that Mengele
allowed it to remain untouched. Most of
the beauties who entered Mengele’s
view emerged from it much changed, as
he could not bear admiring them. He put
beauties on one of two paths—the Ibi
path or the Orli path. If you were on the
Orli path, you might be beautiful on the
day of your arrival, but on the very next
you’d be given a disguise; Mengele
would puff up your belly and swell your
legs to sausages, or he’d turn your skin
to wax and set it to run with sores. If you
were on the Ibi path, you could go to
work in the Puff; you could lean from the
window and flutter like a rare, colorful
bird and listen to the madam negotiate
your price with the men knocking at the
door. Dr. Miri’s path, the path of a
Jewish doctor respected by Mengele,
was the rarest one of all.
Orli and Ibi were Dr. Miri’s sisters.
She didn’t see them much. If a person
wanted to make Miri cry, all he had to
do was mention Ibi and Orli. Mengele
did this from time to time, whenever he
found her work in the laboratory
unsatisfactory or wanted to compel her
to do things she did not want to do. I
would come to witness such exchanges
frequently in the days ahead, but on that
first day, there was only Dr. Miri,
standing there, waiting for our file.
“When do we leave?” Stasha asked
her. A pause hung in the air.
“There are plans for that,” Dr. Miri
said finally, after exchanging a look with
Twins’ Father, the kind of look that
adults use when approaching delicate
subjects that they’ve approached many
times before and still have yet to
resolve. “We’ve started the plans but we
don’t know—”
She was saved from answering when
a woman appeared in the doorway with
her infants in her arms, two bundles
swaddled in gray cloth, their faces
tucked away from view.
Sometimes, when twins were still
babies, their mothers were allowed to
live in the Zoo alongside them to serve
as nursemaids. Clotilde was one such
mother. Everyone knew who Clotilde
was because her husband had killed an
SS man; he’d seized a pistol from the
guard, issued a fatal shot, and led a
flicker of an uprising. Three SS were
felled before the end of this siege, and
care was taken to ensure that the hanging
of this rebel was witnessed by all. But
instead of inspiring fear, his death bred a
hero’s tale. Her children would always
have that legacy, Clotilde was fond of
claiming, but their father’s fame was
apparently of little comfort to the babies.
They whimpered and kicked their tiny
feet against their dingy wrappings, as if
to protest their patriarch’s violent end.
Stasha drew close to Clotilde and
tried to inspect the bundles. I was afraid
she would ask to hold the babies—she
tended to think herself more capable than
she really was—but thankfully, she
remained interested only in her own
questions.
“What do we eat?” she asked
Clotilde, who passed one of the babies
to Dr. Miri to admire. I saw Dr. Miri
stiffen at the sight of the child, but
Clotilde seemed blissfully unaware of
this reaction, too invested in answering
Stasha with a tone of educational
bitterness.
“Soup that isn’t soup!” she
proclaimed with glee.
“I’ve never heard of such a soup
before. What’s in a soup like that?”
“Today? Boiled roots. Tomorrow?
Boiled roots. After that? Boiled roots
and a bit of nothing. Does that sound
good to you?”
“There are things that sound better.”
Stasha nodded at the babies. “Your twins
are lucky not to have to eat soup like
that.”
“Pray for better, then,” Clotilde
instructed. “And if your prayers aren’t
answered, then eat your prayers. Prayer
alone can keep a body full.” The babies
saw the absurdity of this, and their
whimpers assumed the turbulence of earpiercing bawls.
“We don’t pray,” Stasha told her,
raising her voice to be heard above the
wails.
We’d stopped praying in the fall of
1939. November 12. Like many who
stop praying, it was a familial event,
spurred by disappearance. Although, to
be most accurate, I should say that
prayer experienced a surge for one
week, then two, and it wasn’t until the
first thaw that it died entirely. By the
time the bluebells thrust their heads up in
the soil, prayer had become a buried
thing.
I wasn’t about to explain this to
Clotilde, whose eyebrows were already
arching disdainfully at us. She regarded
the heads of her babies and covered
them with her scarf, as if hoping to
protect them from our lack of faith.
“You will reconsider your position
when you get hungry enough,” she
muttered, and then she and Twins’ Father
had a quick conversation in Czech, the
meaning of which was unknown to us,
but my impression from the blunt ends of
their words and their shattered delivery
was that each was telling the other to
know his or her place. As the fray
mounted, a torn and fearful look entered
Dr. Miri’s face—not unlike the
expression a child has while witnessing
her parents fight—and she stepped
between the two quarrelers.
“But maybe,” she suggested to us, her
voice winsome despite the fact that she
had to shout to be heard, “maybe, instead
of praying, you will wish. You do wish,
don’t you? You can have as many wishes
as you want here.”
Her manner was so even, so
practiced, that I realized that much of Dr.
Miri’s work in the Zoo had to involve
easing similar conflicts to a halt. She
was successful in this case. Clotilde spat
on the floor, signaling her surrender in
the argument, and Twins’ Father smiled a
little at the fanciful nature of this
proposed resolution before returning to
our interview.
“Where have you lived?” he asked
us. “Any other siblings? Your parents—
both Polish Jews, yes? Your birth—
natural? Cesarean? Any complications?”
We could hear the travel of his pen as
he sorted out all the details we gave him,
and then, right as we were nearly
finished, a troop of guards flooded past;
the dust rose, the dogs barked, and
Twins’ Father threw his pen to the
ground with a force that made us jump a
little. The babies’ wails increased. The
man put his head in his hands, and we
thought he might be going to sleep
forever, that he’d decided to stop living
altogether, just like that. We’d heard that
such phenomena had a habit of occurring
in this place. But after we’d watched the
top of his prematurely gray head for a
minute, he looked back up at us,
thoroughly alive.
“Forgive me,” he said with a weak
smile. “I ran out of ink. That’s all. I am
always running out of ink. I am always
—” For a second, it appeared as if he
might sink again, but then he righted
himself, just as suddenly as he had
before, and smiled at us broadly while
waving his hand. “Go, now, for roll
call.”
We began to turn away from him,
obedient, but then he gestured for us to
wait. He made a point of looking
directly into our eyes. It was obvious
that what he said to us was something he
repeated often, to any child who would
listen.
“Your first assignment for class is to
learn the other children’s names. Recite
them to each other. When a new child
comes, learn that name too. When a child
leaves us, remember the name.”
I swore I would remember. Stasha
swore too. And then she asked after his
real name.
Twins’ Father stared down at the
papers for one minute, maybe two. He
seemed lost in the answers he’d so
carefully composed, as if all the check
marks and little boxes he’d inked in
black had blacked him out too, and then,
just as we’d resigned ourselves to
leaving without an answer, he lifted his
eyes to us.
“It was Zvi Singer once,” he said.
“But that is not important now.”
We stood for roll call in that earlymorning light, our noses twitching in an
effort to shake the stench of ash and the
unwashed. September’s heat lingered in
the air. It bounced off us in waves,
haloed us with dust. This roll call was
the first time I saw all of Mengele’s
subjects gathered together: the multiples,
the giants, the Lilliputs, the limbless, the
Jews he’d deemed curiously Aryan in
appearance. While some regarded us
innocently, others held suspicion in their
stares, and I had to wonder how long we
would be considered zugangi. We did
our best to ignore these looks as we
sawed through our hard heels of
breakfast bread and drank our muddy,
fake coffee. Most of my bread I gave to
Stasha. But I drank all of my fake coffee,
which was very sour, like it had been
brewed in an old shoe at the bottom of
the river, according to my sister. When
Stasha drank her coffee, her throat took
offense and she was compelled to spit
into the distance. Unfortunately, the
Rabinowitzes were contained in that
distance—they were all lined up to
receive their breakfast—and Stasha’s
spittle insulted the eldest son of the
family, as it landed squarely on the lapel
of his suit coat.
The Rabinowitzes were Lilliputs.
There was a whole family of them,
complete with a baton-wielding
patriarch, and they all still dressed in the
velvets and silks of their performance
costumes, colorful garments edged with
gilt and lace and swinging with tassels.
The hair of the women was
pompadoured high, and the wavy beards
of the men streamed behind them like
banners in a parade. They were an
ostentatious sight, and though I didn’t
share the sentiment, I could see why
others resented them. For one, where
else could one find an intact family in
Auschwitz? And for two, they were
among the grandest beneficiaries of
Mengele’s attentions. His marvel over
the family not only put them in a superior
state of mind but blessed them with a
spacious room to themselves in the
infirmary, and their quarters brimmed
with elusive comforts: Tables draped
with lace and a window frilled with
pink voile curtains. A full tea set painted
with a willow-tree pattern. A miniature
armchair in plush leather, big enough to
seat a lamb. Mengele had even given
them a radio, which Mirko, the eldest
son, a teenager, was entrusted with.
Mirko always sang along with that radio,
even when there weren’t words to the
music; he’d invent words, just to have
something to sing. He was the one Stasha
was unfortunate enough to strike with
spittle.
“You take care who you spit on,
zugang,” Mirko said to her through
gritted teeth.
I tried to wipe the spittle from his
coat as I apologized, but he withdrew, as
if doubly insulted by my efforts, and
addressed the fabric with a swipe of his
hat brim. Stasha stared at him all the
while, mesmerized, her eyes spreading
themselves wider than I’d thought our
eyes could go. They grew as if to make
more room to inspect the curiosity
before her, and her appraisal was
obvious, verging on ill-mannered.
“Haven’t seen my kind before, have
you?” Mirko challenged.
“You are not our first,” Stasha lied.
“We’ve seen shows, lots of shows. We
used to go to the theater all the time. We
saw a whole troupe of people like you
once.”
I often had to wonder where she
summoned these lies from. They came so
easily to her, as if she had another nature
devoted strictly to fabrication. I can’t
say that I wasn’t unnerved by her deceit,
but she appeared to know how to draw
in people like Mirko, who suddenly lost
his defensive stance. His balled-up
hands relaxed at his sides, and once the
disgust left his face, I saw how
handsome it was. He had features that a
girl reading a romance novel would
have projected onto the imaginary hero,
and I’m sure he was well aware of its
powers, because he made a gentlemanly
point of turning to Stasha, and allowed
me to blush with some degree of
privacy.
“I would hardly have mistaken you
for sophisticates,” he said to her. “But I
suppose that even young ones like you
may have use for the theater. Do you
have any talent between you?”
“My sister is a dancer,” Stasha said.
She made her usual mistake of pointing
to herself while saying this. I grasped
her pointing finger and put it in my
direction.
“Oh?” Mirko’s gaze then focused
solely on me. “Where have you danced?
May I suggest a collaboration?
Performing keeps the doctor very happy.
We give him private shows from time to
time, entertain his friends. Like
Verschuer. Have you heard of
Verschuer? He is the doctor’s mentor.
Even Mengele, yes, he has a mentor. If
you are a good dancer, perhaps I could
mentor you?”
He performed an impromptu jig and
then concluded with a proud bow.
“I come from a long line of dancers,
and my grandmother, she was a tall
woman, like you. We’ve danced all over,
for kings and queens. We tell jokes too.
Would you care to hear one? You
would? What kind of joke would you
prefer?”
Before we had a chance to answer,
the palest woman we’d ever seen, white
hair blazing at her back like winter,
descended upon this small person in a
colorless and incandescent glory. She
swooped down and pummeled him; she
stomped on his tiny feet as he yowled.
She asked him who he was to think
himself better than tall people, human
people like us, even if we were just a
pair of weak zugangi. Stasha tried to
intervene—she pointed out that he
wasn’t bothering us in the least—but the
insulting angel was too preoccupied
with her torture to listen. She chased him
off, stepping on his heels as he ran, and
threw a couple of rocks at him for good
measure.
“You ugly ghost! You better watch
yourself in your sleep,” Mirko
threatened before retreating behind the
boys’ barracks.
“Try it, tadpole!” his tormentor
shouted. “I’d like to see you make me
hate my life. If they can’t do it, how will
you? Every day, I wake ready to burst,
because I am filled with poison and
vigor and plans for revenge. Just try to
complete my suffering! Try!”
After concluding this outburst, the
angel beamed triumphant and then fell to
dusting off her sullied clothes with an
aggravated sweep of her hands. She
wore once-white pajamas of frayed silk
and was so lean and tall that she
resembled a pillar of salt. The eyes in
her pale face were bordered by bruises
that lent her the look of a panda. This
was curious enough until one noticed
that the eyes themselves were pink as
roses.
Her name was Bruna. Or at least, that
was the name she was going by in those
days. The guards had given it to her as a
sort of mockery—it was a German name
that meant “brunette.” She twisted the
darkness of their intention for her own
purposes, though, and wore the name
with her own pale bravado.
“Phooey to dwarves,” Bruna said.
“Give me one of the cripples any day, or
even one of the giants. You would agree
with me?”
I was about to argue with this
perspective, but Stasha interrupted.
“How did you get the bruises?”
Bruna pointed to the whorls of violet
with pride.
“Ox gave them to me. For mouthing
off to her. But she mouthed off to me
first. If this were my hometown, my gang
would take vengeance on her. I’d only
have to say the word. Here, I have no
gang. I miss it a great deal. I wasn’t any
kind of leader. But I was a good enough
thief. A diligent one, you could say.
Started with pockets but soon advanced
to grander heists. Guess what my
greatest theft was.”
“A house?”
“How do you steal a house? People
can’t steal houses!”
“They stole ours,” my sister pointed
out.
“Mine too,” Bruna conceded. “You
are smart in that odd way, aren’t you?
But it’s not a house. It’s bigger than a
house, because a house can’t die. Guess!
You’re never going to guess, are you?
Well, I’ll tell you—a swan! I stole a
swan from the zoological gardens in
Odessa. Went to the pond and tucked it
up right under my coat. I wore a very
roomy coat in those days, just for
stealing purposes. Of course, the coat
wasn’t so big as to hide the swan
entirely. It was a young one, so it was
smaller than average, and it bit me a
little, here and there, but after I took it
home, it was quite enchanted with our
life, and I’m sure it would have lived
with me forever if it could.”
We asked what the good in swanstealing was. It seemed a curious
transgression, and hardly profitable.
“They were storming the city. They
were shooting all our animals, any
animal they could find. The soldiers
liked to kick our dogs till they flew.
Some of our animals—the horses—the
men took for themselves. You do not
want me to tell you what they did with
our cats. Well, I wasn’t about to let the
greatest beauty in Odessa die by their
hands. So when they stormed into my
lodgings—I twisted her neck.”
She illustrated this savage transaction
with a wrenching of both her broad
hands. It was easy enough to imagine her
extinguishing that life. We might as well
have heard the crackle of bones, seen the
white length of a feathery neck go limp.
It seemed doubtless that Bruna heard the
crack and saw the limpness still; her
pink eyes went misty with reflection, and
she thrust her hands in her pockets
hurriedly, anxious to dismiss the memory
of this most useful violence. She wiped
an eye on the shoulder of her pajamas,
and forced a smile.
“But my gang—we were talking
about my gang. We might not have been
much but we took care of each other.
Like I just took care of you.”
“We will return the favor,” Stasha
promised.
“Of course you will,” our angel said.
“You’ll do whatever I say.”
Our faces must have shown alarm at
the
thought
of
being
Bruna’s
handmaidens of crime, because she
dropped her voice quite low, and she
slung her arms across our backs and
huddled us close.
“Oh, don’t you worry,” she cooed. “I
won’t ask for anything too bad or
complex. It’s not like I want you to
murder someone. But I might ask you to
organize some things for me from time to
time. Just because you can get away with
more here. Since you’re twins and all.
You could steal a whole loaf of bread
with no punishment! A whole vat of
soup, even! I saw the Stern triplets pull
that one off, and a block of margarine to
boot! They always share with me, since I
taught them how to organize. Here, to
organize is to steal, you know. You
organize to live and to trade and to
amuse yourself. Without organizing, I
would go mad with boredom.”
Stasha wondered aloud how one
could be bored in this place, which
seemed to require that one be perched
always on the worst possibilities. Bruna
scoffed.
“You won’t wonder after you’ve
lived here forever and are poked with
needles every day. You won’t wonder
after they keep taking your picture and
drawing your face while all around you,
other people are losing their faces, their
bodies too.” She sighed and slouched, as
if suddenly pulled toward the dust, then
straightened herself, pushing her
shoulders back with some concentrated
effort toward uprightness. “Now that I
have educated you, you must entertain
me in return. I need entertainment. A
trick, maybe. All you twins have tricks.”
“You’re not a twin?” Stasha seemed
surprised by this, but the stupidity of this
question was confirmed by Bruna’s
guffaw.
“Are you blind? If so, I’d be quiet
about that if I were you. Or you’ll get the
gas.”
“What is the gas?” Stasha wondered.
Our explainer of things became
suddenly reticent and sorrowful.
“Never mind that,” Bruna finally
said. “Just do not let anyone think you’re
even weaker or stupider than you are,
not even for a moment. Understand?”
She stood very straight and dignified,
and she swept a hand from her face to
her hips to indicate the extent of her
pallor.
“Never seen an albino before?” she
asked. “Because that is what I am. A
genetic mutation.”
“So you’re like him.” Stasha gestured
in the direction of Mirko’s retreat, and
we saw him peek his head around the
corner of the boys’ barracks, where he’d
apparently been eavesdropping on the
conversation. He stuck out his tongue
and then disappeared once more.
“Mutant! Pisser! Worm!” she shouted
at him before informing us, “No, not like
him at all! Better than him! But not as
good as you twins. You—if one of you
dies by accident, Mengele, he wails and
stomps his feet. You are still objects to
him, mere things. But precious objects.
You are the grand pianos of this place,
the mink coats, the caviar. You are
valuable! The rest of us—just kazoos,
canvas, tinned beans.”
As she ended this little lecture—
which she clearly loved delivering,
delighting in such a neat summation of
our troubles—a black fly careened near
her nose, drawing a new stream of
insults from her mouth.
“Tramp!” she screeched at the insect.
“Parasite! Wretch! You think you can
make me hate my life too!” She leaped
after the fly, chased him this way and
that till she lost her balance and
collapsed in a white heap, the dust
billowing about her where she fell. I
leaned down to her, offered her my hand,
but she shook me off as if possessed and
turned her dirt-streaked face with those
blackened eyes up to the sky, which was
not the blue of a normal sky but a flame-
touched blanket of gray.
“Tell me,” she said, her eyes trailing
the fly’s escape over the fence and into
the fields, “what does it feel like—to be
of value?”
I said that I didn’t know. A lie,
obviously. I knew the feeling of value
well, I’d known it until Mama and Zayde
were taken away, and it still remained—
though in an altered form—with Stasha,
who valued me more than herself. But I
wasn’t about to boast of this to Bruna,
whose frenzy had enlarged in such a
manner that the whole of her quaked.
The index finger of her right hand shook
the most. She pointed it at a building in
the distance, a building that I’d later
come to know as one of Mengele’s
laboratories.
“Please,” she entreated, “tell me
when you understand? I would like to
know.”
September 7, 1944
The bread made everyone forget. That
was one of the first things Bruna taught
me. It was full of bromide, and all it
took was a day’s worth of crust lining
your stomach to make your mind mist
over. Since I was the half in charge of
time and memory, I always gave the bulk
of my portions to Stasha. One of us, I
decided, should be encouraged to forget
as much as possible, and I found other
ways to sustain myself, with Bruna’s
help.
Bruna called me Smidgen One and
Stasha was Smidgen Two. It was her
way of owning us, but I didn’t mind it
much because it seemed better to be
owned by Bruna than anyone else. She
taught me all sorts of useful things. She
taught me how to make a soup from the
grass in the soccer field, how to stew it
discreetly in a pot, and how to obtain a
pot in the first place. She showed me
how to ingratiate myself with the cook
and how to carry supplies to the kitchen
so that I might organize some things for
us. A potato here, an onion there, a few
lumps of coal, a book of matches, a
spoon. She sewed a little burlap sack for
me to keep tucked into the waistband of
my skirt so that I could be a stealthier
thief. Soon enough, I held the whole of
our world in that little sack.
I wondered what Mama and Zayde
might think of our association with
Bruna. On the outside, I would’ve feared
her, but in a place swarming with
treachery, she was family, and we did
our best to repay her with our affection.
She loved our games—they were more
sophisticated than the standard gravedigging game that many of the other
children favored—and she was always
ready for riddles, or Kill Hitler, or the
Classification of Living Things, which
she was quite terrible at, as she had such
odd opinions about what made a living
thing superior or functional or worthy of
life.
Bruna was only seventeen, but she’d
been in Auschwitz for three years and
had slunk from labor camp to labor
camp for months before that, and so she
knew, she assured us, what she was
talking about. She said that where we
lived was far superior to other sites that
were unpaved, their only concrete
poured into towers, their only decoration
the crook of guns into the sky.
“More civilized here,” she liked to
say. “But that is not a good thing.”
She kept herself occupied, this Bruna,
and not only with us. She was always
leaping up to help one person or to
torture another; she was a busybody who
presided over everyone. Much of the
day, she stood on the top of a barrel
outside the girls’ barracks, shielding her
eyes from the sun with one hand. Nothing
escaped her attention. If a nurse wanted
something organized for the infirmary,
Bruna found it. If a twin was bullying
another, Bruna bullied back, with
pleasure. If Twins’ Father required a
book, Bruna procured it. If someone
wasn’t a great lover of communism,
Bruna helped him or her find that love.
Still, even these activities were often
not enough to satisfy her restless nature.
“I’m bored,” she declared on our
third day within the Zoo. “You should
entertain me. I’ve shown you girls my
talents.” She turned her pink eyes on me.
“Smidgen Two keeps boasting about
your tap dancing.”
“Stasha is exaggerating,” I said.
“Show me,” Bruna commanded,
dismounting from her barrel with a
showy jump. “I am a great appreciator of
art. My life is proof of that. I stole a
paintbrush once. I stole tickets to the
ballet. I stole a dozen china figurines
from a fine department store. They
caught me for that one, but I stole those
figurines all the same. I did time, paid
penance. I suffered for art, you see, and
so you can’t refuse me.”
She regarded me expectantly and then
removed a few stones from the dirt
before us to prepare a stage. I was
shocked when she failed to toss them in
the direction of any passerby, as she was
known never to waste a potential
weapon, but it seemed that she was
occupied with a different form of
anticipation.
“Come now, Pearl. Show me how
you dance. Let me forget a little.”
“I’m not going to dance here,” I
insisted. “I have no reason to.”
“As practice for when we get out,”
Stasha said, and she bent to clear
another stone away. “For the future. I’m
in charge of the future, remember?”
“I won’t.”
Bruna folded her arms and watched
us argue. This seemed entertainment
enough for her, but Stasha insisted that I
had to practice, I had to make
preparations for the life we’d have when
the war was over because my dancing
might be the only way to provide for our
family once the cities were destroyed
and all the dead were counted up, once
the fathers never came back and the
houses never rebuilt themselves.
When I failed to accept this argument,
she upped the stakes. That’s what Judy
Garland would do, she claimed. Judy
would practice through her suffering no
matter how much her feet bled or her
stomach grumbled, no matter how much
her head swam and the lice flocked to
her.
“I’m not like Judy Garland,” I
protested.
But my sister remained unconvinced.
So I danced in the dust, and Stasha
provided some music by whistling. Her
whistle was terribly feeble, all starts
and stops, but I’ll admit that it took me
back, and for a moment, I actually did
enjoy dancing, enjoyed it more than I’d
ever have thought possible in such a
place, and I might have happily danced
for hours if my audience hadn’t gained
another member, an unwanted spectator
who seated himself with a leisurely air
on a nearby stump.
It was Taube, a young warden famous
for his ability to creep up behind a
woman and twist her neck, extracting her
heartbeat from her body before she even
had a chance to scream. He had yellow
eyes and hair, and ruddy apple cheeks
that bobbed as he spoke while the rest of
his face remained still as stone. At the
sight of him, I stopped, but Taube
gestured for me to continue, and he
crossed his legs neatly at the ankles, as
if settling in at a movie theater for a
much-anticipated
performance.
He
pulled a bar of chocolate from his
pocket and set to work attacking it with
oddly dainty nibbles. Even from some
distance, I could make out the
semicircles of his bites, and it was easy
to imagine the sweetness he enjoyed.
“Keep practicing,” he ordered, his
teeth coated in darkness.
So I continued. I tried to imagine an
audience other than Taube.
“Faster,” he instructed.
Heel and toe, I struck the dust. I
thought that if I danced fast enough, hard
enough, he might let the dance end. And
then, to my relief—
“Stop!” he commanded.
I did. But Taube’s apple cheeks
bobbed irritably. It seemed that I’d
misunderstood his directive.
“Not you! You keep dancing. Her!”
He pointed to Stasha. “Enough with the
whistling!”
Stasha shut her mouth with a snap,
and her hands crept up to cover her ears.
I could see that the sound of my feet
striking the ground disturbed her. She
could feel what I felt, all the pain, all the
fatigue. Her voice whittled by fear, she
begged Taube to permit me to rest.
“But Pearl’s very talented. Don’t you
agree?”
“Very much so,” Stasha quavered.
She wouldn’t look up from her feet, and
I knew that they were throbbing like my
own.
I might have been able to continue if I
hadn’t seen Stasha’s anguish, but it
tripped me up and I fell. Bruna offered
me her hand, but Taube shoved her away,
electing to pick me up by the waistband
of my skirt. He then dragged me in the
dust over to his stump, took a few steps
back—so as to create a fine distance
from which to study me where he’d
placed me, like a toy on a shelf—and
began to clap. It felt as if all our hearts
were suspended in the air between his
hands.
“Do you girls know Zarah Leander?
Star of The Life and Loves of
Tschaikovsky? The finest actress of all
of German cinema?” he asked when the
mocking claps finally subsided.
We did not know, but this didn’t feel
safe to admit. Instead, we gushed about
her beauty and talent, and Taube grinned
all the while, basking in the compliments
as if it were him we praised, and not a
distant movie star.
“Zarah is a family friend, and she is
always looking for protégées. I am
impressed.” He stabbed my cheek with
his finger. “You have good feet, and I
hear she will be filming a new musical
soon. Perhaps, if you work hard enough,
your dancing will improve in such a way
that I may recommend you to her.
Wouldn’t that be a nice thing to happen
in your life?”
“I suppose so,” I offered.
“We are very lucky to have met here,
then,” he said. His face assumed some
facsimile of kind excitement. “I’ll call
Miss Leander immediately. I’m sure she
won’t hesitate—perhaps she’ll get on an
airplane and come whisk you away
within the hour!”
An answer was expected.
“Perhaps,” I said.
“Perhaps? Such a weak response—
where is your conviction, your
determination? You should pack your
things! Why do you hesitate? Don’t you
know the life that awaits you?”
Only then did I notice that three other
guards had gathered nearby to watch the
spectacle—they laughed so hard that
their cigarettes tumbled from their
mouths. This laughter, combined with the
effort of my dancing, left me sick and
breathless, and I started to gasp. One of
these onlooking wardens leaped to my
side in concern—everyone knew that
Mengele punished guards who let harm
come to any of his twins—and gave me a
gentle slap on the back.
“You should hope that the doctor
doesn’t hear about this,” he warned his
fellow guards.
“Just a joke.” Taube shrugged. “Jews
love jokes, especially jokes about
themselves. You have yet to observe
this?”
He placed a proprietary hand on my
shoulder and shook me till my teeth
clashed with my tongue.
“You love to laugh, don’t you? Laugh
a little for me now.”
I wanted to appease him, but before I
could manage the slightest titter, Bruna
started to cackle beside me. She roared
and guffawed and snorted with a
mocking force.
“Not you!” For once, the whole of
Taube’s face was animated with disgust.
“Communists have no right to laughter!”
He was too easy to bait, that Taube.
Clever Bruna increased her cackle and
turned and ran, and Taube trailed her,
like a dog suddenly distracted by the
prospect of a new, more challenging
prey. By the wisp of her laughter, she led
him away.
It was the sweetest thing she’d ever
do in Auschwitz, but it made me never
want to laugh again.
Once the yard was emptied of
wardens, Stasha sat down beside me.
She put my shoes on for me; she wiped
my eyes with her sleeve. None of it, she
saw, did much good. Deciding that one
of our old games was the only thing that
could cheer me, she positioned herself
so that we sat back to back, spine to
spine, hips to hips. It was the game of
our youngest years. This game was
played by drawing whatever entered our
heads, at the same exact moment, and
then checking to make sure that we’d
drawn the same image.
We took up sticks and etched these
images in the dirt. First, we drew birds.
We checked. They were the same. Then,
moons and stars hovered over the birds.
They were perfectly alike. We drew
ships. We drew cities. Big cities, little
cities, untouched cities, cities without
ghettos. We drew roads leading out of
these cities. All our roads led in the
same direction.
Then, without warning, I had no idea
where to go or what to draw. My mind
went blank, but I could hear my sister
scribbling on with her stick, free of any
interruption. I had no choice but to peek
over her shoulder. Unfortunately, the
shift of my spine from hers gave my
intentions away.
“Why do you have to cheat?” she
demanded.
“Who says I’m cheating?”
“I felt you move. You peeked.”
I didn’t try to defend myself against
this charge.
“It’s because you’re different here,
isn’t it? They’ve changed us already.”
She was not wrong, but I wasn’t
willing to accept this.
“It’s not true,” I told her. “We’re the
same still. Let’s try again.”
We would have tried again, we
would have tried forever, but before we
had a chance to try at all, a white truck
with a red cross on its flank arrived.
Nurse Elma emerged from the truck’s
door, her step so delicate and fussy that
she could have been descending the
ramp of a cruise ship. We had heard of
this Elma from the other children in the
Zoo, but this was to be our first
encounter.
After spying Elma, Stasha drew a
bullet in the dust. I drew bullets too,
drew them faster and faster. For every
step that brought Elma nearer to us, the
bullets multiplied.
I tried not to look up at her, to focus
only on the shadow she cast over our
drawings, but Elma didn’t give me a
choice. Squatting beside us, she thrust
her powdered visage into mine and
pulled on the tip of my nose as if I were
some rubbery thing without feeling.
Elma had a fierce-angled face that
Stasha would later claim was of an
evolutionary design that allowed her to
track her prey in the dark, but at that
moment, when the nurse was near
enough to sink her teeth into me, I
noticed only the calculated nature of her
beauty, the hair bleached to meringue,
the mouth overdrawn with crimson. It
was as if she did her best to look like a
drop of blood in the snow.
“Aren’t you too old to play in the
dirt?” Elma asked, giving my nose one
final tug.
Neither of us knew how to respond,
but Elma wasn’t looking for an answer.
She was content simply admiring the
slenderness of her shadow as it fell over
our drawings. She pivoted to take in the
view and then bent down for a closer
look at the images in the dirt.
“What are those?” She pointed at the
bullets.
“Teardrops,” Stasha answered.
Nurse Elma cocked her head to one
side, and smiled at our drawings. I think
she knew that the so-called tears were
bullets. She must’ve been charmed by
our subterfuge, though, because she
didn’t handle us too roughly as she
hoisted us up by our collars and steered
us toward the red-crossed truck, her
hands gripping the backs of our necks as
if we were kittens she was dangling over
a bucket of water but did not yet have
permission to drown.
Stasha
Chapter Three
Little Deathless
I want you to know the eyes. The
hundreds of them, in a constant stare.
They could look at you without ever
seeing you and when you met their gaze,
it felt as if the sky were tapping at your
back in warning.
It was on the day that the eyes saw me
that I was changed, made different from
Pearl.
But to tell you about the eyes, I must
first tell you about his laboratories.
There were laboratories for blooddrawing, laboratories for x-rays. One
laboratory we never saw, because it sat
at the foot of one of the cremos and held
the dead. Mirko claimed to have been
inside that laboratory once, after a
fainting spell. He said he woke beneath
Uncle’s resuscitating hands and was
saved, but others disputed the legitimacy
of this account. See for yourself! Mirko
always said to these naysayers, but all
prayed that they never would.
The laboratories weren’t places you
entered but places you were taken to, on
Tuesdays and Thursdays and Saturdays,
for eight hours at a time. They were
filled with not only doctors and nurses
but photographers and x-ray techs and
artists with brushes, all of them
determined to capture the particulars of
us for Uncle’s medical review. In the
hands of these technicians, we became
picture after picture, file after file.
Materials were extracted from us and
colored with dye and placed between
slides, set to whorl and fluoresce and
live beneath the perspective of a
microscope.
Late at night, when Pearl was fast
asleep, her consciousness a safe
distance from my own, I’d think of these
tiny pieces of us and wonder if our
feelings remained in them, even though
they were mere particles. I wondered if
the pieces hated themselves for their
participation in the experiments. I
imagined that they did. And I longed to
tell them that it wasn’t their fault, that the
collaboration wasn’t a willing one, that
they’d been stolen, coerced, made to
suffer. But then I’d realize how little
influence I had over these pieces—after
we’d been parted, they answered only to
nature and science and the man who
called himself Uncle. There was nothing
I could do on their numerous,
microscopic behalfs.
On the first occasion that these
extractions were to be seized from our
bodies, Nurse Elma led us down the hall
of the laboratory. She held her fingertips
to our backs so that we could feel the
screw of her nails at our spines, and the
airiness of her breath drifted down from
on high, and our mouths were gagged by
a perfume that made her sweeter than she
really was. She escorted us past door
after door, and when she trod on my heel
I tripped and plunged forward and fell in
a heap. When I looked up from this
stumble, I saw Dr. Miri.
“Up, up,” she said. Urgency threaded
her voice as she offered her hand. It was
gloved, but I could feel the warmth of it
still, and thrilled to her touch before
seeing that she regretted the gesture. She
recoiled, and put the hand in her pocket.
At the time, I thought she regretted
touching me because a show of kindness
could compromise her standing with
colleagues like Elma. Years later, I
would realize her sorrow arose from
taking care of the children that Uncle
claimed for his own. It must have been
like stringing a harp for someone who
played his harp with a knife, or binding
a book for someone whose idea of
reading was feeding pages to a fire.
But these realizations weren’t
available to me then as a semi-child, a
hider-in-coats, a shrinking pretender to
adulthood. There, in the laboratory, I
knew only that we were flanked by two
women who seemed to fall in interesting
positions in the order of living things.
They looked to be entirely without
feeling, their soft forms walled with
protective layers. In Nurse Elma, this
seemed a natural state; she was an
exoskeletal creature, all her bones and
thorns mounted on the outside—a
perfect, glossy specimen of a crab. I
assumed that she was born this way,
numb to everyone around her. Dr. Miri
was differently armored—though she
was gilded with hard plates, it was a
poor protection, one that hadn’t warded
off all wounds, and like the starfish, she
was gifted at regeneration. When a piece
of her met with tragedy, it grew back
threefold, and the tissues multiplied
themselves into an advanced sort of
flesh with its own genius for survival.
How long, I wondered, would it take
for me to become like her?
I hadn’t meant to wonder it aloud, but
that’s exactly what I did, because Elma’s
hand closed on my shoulder, and she
gave me a shake.
“Are you talking about me?” the nurse
chided.
“About her.” I pointed to Dr. Miri,
who blushed. But she was adept at
covering for us children and negotiating
Elma’s moods.
“She only means that she wants to be
a doctor someday too,” she said, and her
face, with its telling eyes, telegraphed
that I should follow her lead. “Isn’t that
right?”
I nodded, and rocked back and forth
on my heels as I stood before them,
made myself smaller, more girlish.
People usually found the gesture quite
charming, for whatever reason. It
worked for Pearl and Shirley Temple
both, and it worked for me then, because
the nurse released me.
“Well, then,” she boomed, and she
rapped her knuckles on my head.
“Maybe if you work hard enough you
will become a great doctor someday.
Anything is possible here, yes?”
Will you believe me when I say that
the weather saved me from having to
answer this absurd question? We heard a
knocking at the windows of the
laboratory, a sound like thousands of tiny
fists pummeling the glass. A scatter of
nurses and doctors rushed about, closing
the windows, fastening them shut, while
beads of hail spilled down onto the
floors. It was as if a sea’s worth of
oysters had been pried open in the sky
and released the treasures that were my
sister’s namesake into the halls of the
laboratory.
In this white tumult of hail, Pearl and
I found ourselves unattended, and our
interest was drawn to a room a few
steps away, its door ajar. I stepped
forward for a closer look at what lay
within. Through the door slit, I saw
walls lined with books, and I had a
finger-twitch to steal one of the volumes.
Surely, a laboratory book would be able
to advise me on how to make my body
withstand a place like this, how to
fortress it and put the pain out. Books
had never led me in the wrong direction.
It seemed foolish to try to endure without
such counsel by my side.
On tiptoe, I approached the room and
pushed on the knob gently, but the sweat
on my palm made it too slick, and the
door swung open and the hinges tattled
on me with a creak—Nurse Elma, her
cap askew, stormed in and yanked me
from the doorway, but as she did so, the
door opened still further. And that’s
when I met the eyes, or when the eyes
met me.
I remain uncertain as to how to
classify the exchange of glances that took
place.
All I know was that rows of eyes
presided over the desk on the rear wall.
They were fastened through the iris,
pierced with pins, all assembled as
neatly as children at roll call. They were
colored like a pretty season: green and
hazel and brown and ocher. A lone blue
eye stood at attention on the periphery.
All the eyes were faded in the way only
living things that no longer live can be,
their irises veiled with husks of tissue
that stirred when a breeze lilted through
the window. At their centers, the silvery
winks of pins assured their captivity.
Though just a girl, I had ideas about
violence. Violence had a horizon, a
scent, a color. I’d seen it in books and
newsreels, but I didn’t truly know it until
I saw the effects of it on Zayde, saw him
come to our basement home in the ghetto
with a red rag over his face, saw Mama
go soundless as she bound his nose with
the scrap torn from the hem of her
nightgown. Pearl held the lamp during
this procedure so that Mama could see,
but I was shuddering so much that I
couldn’t assist her. I should be able to
say that I saw violence happen to Mama
when a guard came to our door with
news about the disappearance, but I kept
my eyes closed tight the whole time,
sealed them shut while Pearl stared
straight ahead, and because my sister
saw it all, I felt the images secondhand,
felt them burn on the backs of my eyelids
—I saw the guard’s boot glow and
furrow itself in Mama’s side as she lay
on the floor. Pearl was angry that I was
not an active witness, and so she forced
me to take it all in, and when I begged
her to stop subjecting me to such sights,
she informed me that I had no say in the
matter, because she would never look
away, not ever, no matter how much it
hurt me, because in looking away, she
said, we would lose ourselves so
thoroughly that our loss would require
another name.
So, I knew violence. Or I knew it
well enough to understand that it had
happened to the eyes. I knew they’d been
torn from bodies that belonged to people
who deserved such better sights than
what they’d last seen. And even though I
was unaware of what the most beautiful
sight could be, I wanted to give it to
them. I wanted to travel the whole world
over, from sea to mountain and back, and
bring to them an object, an animal, a
view, an instrument, a person—anything
that might reassure them that even as
violence tore on, beauty remained, and it
remembered them still. Realizing the
impossibility of this, I gave the eyes the
only thing I could: a tear crept down my
cheek.
“Why are you crying?” Nurse Elma
demanded. She shut the door on the eyes,
but not before they saw my tear.
“We’re not crying,” I claimed.
“Your sister’s not crying”—she
jerked her snowy head at Pearl and then
crouched to face me—“but you are.
What did you see in there?”
The truth was that I couldn’t describe
what I saw. But I knew that I’d never
stop seeing those eyes, that they’d
follow me for all the days I’d live, wide
open and blinkless, hoping for another
fate. I knew that I’d sense their stare the
most whenever I heard of someone being
born or wed or found. I knew that I’d try
to shut my own eyes, just to have some
peace, but I never would be able to shut
them entirely. True closure, I was sure,
would escape all of us.
“I saw nothing,” I protested.
Drops of moisture from the hailstorm
beaded Nurse Elma’s face and they dove
to the floor, one by one, while she
resorted to her standard tactics.
“I know you saw something,” she
insisted as she shook me. “I just want to
be certain that we saw the same thing. I
want to know this, because I do not want
the other children to be frightened by any
of your wild stories. I am familiar with
children like you. Lovers of fiction!
There was a girl here once, she told a
story about what she saw, a story that
was not true, and do you know what
happened to her?”
I told Nurse Elma that I did not.
“I can’t recall either, not specifically.
How can I be expected to remember?
There are so many of you to look after.
But know this: What came of her wild
stories—it wasn’t good. Do you
understand my meaning?”
I nodded. This gesture served a dual
purpose. Not only did it secure Elma’s
approval, but it allowed a second tear to
descend my cheek without her notice.
“Now tell me, then. What did you see
in that room?”
Searching for a suitable answer, I
thought about rows mounted on the wall
—even in their capture, the eyes had
fluttered their pretty colors with a flighty
animation, and the dust that coated them
had the appearance of pollen. Many had
likely migrated long distances. All
received the treatment of pests. They’d
been lured in, trapped, starved, pinched
into submission, and then, when life had
been sufficiently drained from them,
they’d been pinned into place, mounted
as curiosities for study.
“Butterflies,” I blurted out. “I saw
butterflies. Only butterflies. They
weren’t eyes at all. Just butterflies.”
“Butterflies?”
“Yes. Row after row of butterflies. A
class of insects. In the moth order
Lepidoptera.”
Elma put a finger beneath my chin and
lifted my jaw toward the ceiling. I
wondered if she would halve me, and
just when I figured that she surely
would, she released me and assumed the
tone of a frustrated and imperious
revisionist.
“But they are not butterflies,” she
informed me. “They are beetles. The
doctor has collected them for years.
Understand?”
I said I did understand.
“Say they are beetles, Stasha, I want
to hear it. You made an error in
describing what you saw. Correct
yourself so Pearl understands too.”
“I saw beetles,” I said to Pearl. I did
not look at my sister while I spoke.
“You don’t convince me.”
“I saw beetles, nothing more. Not
butterflies. Beetles. Order Coleoptera.
Two sets of wings.”
Satisfied, she turned and walked on,
her stride enlivened by the interrogation,
and when we reached the end of the hall,
she swung open the door to a room that
would alter us forever. It is easy to think
that there are many such rooms in one’s
life. This room, you might say, that was
the room where I fell in love. Or, This
was the room where I learned that I
was more than my sadness, my pride,
my strength.
But in Auschwitz, I found that the
room that really changes you is the one
that can make you feel nothing at all. It is
the room that says, Come sit in me, and
you will know no pain; your suffering
isn’t real, and your struggles? They’re
only slightly more real than you are,
but not by much. Save yourself, the
room advises, by feeling nothing, and if
you must feel something, don’t doom
yourself by showing it.
Elma stripped us after we entered this
room. Into her arms went the dresses
Mama had sewn; Elma regarded the
strawberry print with scorn. Even fruit
could not avoid offending her.
“So childish,” she observed while
stabbing one of the strawberries with a
red-lacquered finger. “Do you like being
children?”
“Yes,” we said. It would be the last
word that we would ever speak in
unison. I wish I had known that at the
time, but I was too overwhelmed by the
task of pleasing Elma, whose powdery
face lit up with disbelief.
“How funny. I can’t imagine why.”
“I’ve never wanted to grow up,” I
said. This was true. Growing up held too
much risk of growing away from Pearl.
Nurse Elma smiled her too-straight
smile.
“Then you are in the right place,” she
said.
Yes, I should have deduced the truth
about what she was implying about our
future. But something about Nurse Elma
upended me, and I couldn’t think
properly in her presence. Elma seated us
on chairs, their steel backs so cold that
we started to shiver. The room felt icy,
then hot. A fog winged across my vision.
I knew that fog well. It visited me
whenever I saw cruelty. I tried to
imagine Elma into a less cruel person as
she set aside our things and arranged a
tray of measuring instruments, but the
woman’s image had a peculiar solidity
that defied any improvements my
imagination sought to impose on her.
Nothing about her was vague or
negotiable. Some might call this a strong
personality. I wanted to call it that, just
to be human and generous. But it was
obvious that what she really possessed
was emptiness so vast that it managed to
approximate power.
Maybe, I thought, if we flattered her,
she would be nice.
“Tell her she’s pretty,” I whispered to
Pearl.
“You tell her, if you think she’s so
pretty.”
It was as if Nurse Elma detected our
psychic efforts to like her, because she
then crossed to the other side of the
room and busied herself with the
polishing of a pair of silver scissors,
their legs gleamy in the light falling from
the blocky window above. Though
small, this window let in too much light
for girls who had just been stripped. We
crossed our legs tight, covered the buds
on our chests with our hands; we
clutched at these signs of growth as if
hoping to make them feel so unwelcome
that they might voluntarily up and
disappear.
“They’re more frightened of you than
you are of them,” I whispered to my
sister, because there seemed nothing left
to do but joke. Pearl giggled, so I
giggled too. Naturally, our giggles
soured Elma. She threw her scissors
down on the surgeon’s table with a
clatter.
“Do you see any of the other children
laughing?”
We didn’t. In fact, we hadn’t seen the
other children at all, because the
strangeness of this place had so dimmed
our perception. But with Elma’s
direction, we saw that we were not
alone.
There were five other children in the
room.
Lino and Artur Ammerling were tenyear-olds from Galicia. Like us, they
were new arrivals and had been
subjected to some scorn by the Old
Numbers. Hedvah—a girl who slept
three bunks over from us and held the
honor of being the most respected girl in
the Zoo, due to her long tenure and
ability to assert herself with Ox—had
started a rumor that the Ammerlings
weren’t twins at all, but were merely
passing in order to receive the benefits
afforded to those of our station. Twins’
Father had been known to pull such
tricks, she’d said, changing the
paperwork so that young boys could
enjoy the salvation of twin status.
Hedvah cited their different hair colors
—Lino was a redhead, Artur a brunet—
as evidence that they were impostors.
But they had to be twins. I could tell by
the way that they sat in their chairs. They
showed the same shock, the same
trembles, as the nurses counted and
measured their every feature. Not a
single gesture toward identicality was
overlooked—their
eyelashes
were
counted, their eyebrow hairs, the flecks
in their eyes, the dimples at their knees
and cheeks. They were added and
subtracted and compared, two human
equations who could only squirm in their
seats.
And there were Margit and Lenci
Klein, from Hungary. Six years of age.
Whenever
Pearl
and
I
were
immeasurably sad we looked for them,
because they reminded us of how we’d
been as younger girls—hands entwined,
full of secrets and the occasional elbowjab of annoyance. They were always
combing each other’s hair with their
fingers till their strands shone and
making whistles out of blades of grass.
Their mother had left them with
instructions to always wear purple hair
ribbons to make it easier for her to spy
them in a crowd, so they fastened them
atop their heads every day, first thing,
propping them up so that they stood like
velvet ears on their heads. We watched
as the nurses diagrammed their pale,
goose-bumped forms with red ink,
circling a piece here, a bit there, until
their bodies were rivered with scarlet.
The fifth subject stood alone, his
thumb hooked in his mouth. He could
have been thirteen or thirty-five or sixty,
he was so whittled, so beyond age. His
nurse was leafing through files with an
air of boredom, as if there were nothing
left to be done with him. Before her on a
table were two folders, two sets of
photographs, two sets of diagrams, two
sets of x-rays. But there was only one
boy.
And he was an iota of boy, a frailboned brevity with an overbite and teeth
that splayed themselves over his lips
like a crooked fence. Tufts of whitestreaked hair nested on his scalp and
obscured his eyes, which seemed unable
to focus on anything but the ceiling
above. His veins stood so close to the
surface of this boy that in the hospital’s
faulty lights, their clusters lent his skin a
pronounced hue of illness. In his chill
and suffering, he was near blue.
I fixed my eyes on him, hoping he
might sense me and stare back, the way
twins often do, but the boy only coughed
showily, making no effort to disguise his
sickness. The nurse frowned at him
disapprovingly and boxed up half of the
file—this action appeared to disturb the
boy. I watched him sway where he stood
and falter at the knees, and though I was
sure that he was about to collapse, he
simply stared at the box with all the
reverence one might have for a grave,
and then he reached toward it and tried
to run a finger over the lid but the nurse
slapped his hand away, and he withdrew
like a wounded thing and inserted his
thumb in his mouth again. The nurse
declared him finished and gestured to
him to dress, but he refused to accept his
clothes, even as she thrust the garments
forcefully at his sunken chest. It was as
if he’d decided that nothing was
graspable anymore, that there was no
point in trying to hold anything other than
a thumb to one’s mouth. Agitated, the
nurse threw the garments at his feet and
stalked off. And still, he stood bluely
naked, refusing to follow her orders. He
turned only to cough in her direction, and
that’s when our gazes finally met.
I looked away as fast as I could,
which was slow enough to receive his
friendly nod and quick enough that I
could avoid returning it. I couldn’t face
what he had endured, the horrors of
which were made too obvious by the
empty chair at his side.
“I understand what you are saying,”
he said to the empty seat beside him.
“But our father, if he were here, he
would say that curses curse their
utterers. And our mother, if she were
here, she would say—” And then he fell
to coughing again.
It was the boy and his empty chair
that moved me to decide: I would be
more than an experiment in this world. I
was not as smart as Uncle Doctor, but I
could study his movements without him
knowing, and learn about medicine, and
use him to my advantage. Pearl had her
dancing to look forward to—I needed
my own ambition. After all, when the
war ended, someone was going to have
to take care of people. Someone was
going to have to find the lost and put all
the halves together. I saw no reason why
that someone could not be me.
I planned to begin my practice with
the boy. Not knowing his name, I
decided to call him Patient Number
Blue. I studied him, taking in what I
could from a distance, but before I could
think too much on his particulars, I was
interrupted by a high, trilling note.
Uncle Doctor. He entered whistling
with a sprightly step, smelling of
peppermint and starch, the long white
wings of his coat trailing against each
surface he passed and erasing them. I’d
come to learn that he considered himself
an expert at whistling, just as he
considered himself an expert on hygiene
and culture and art and writing. But
while his whistle was errorless, there
was no mistaking its robotic lean. Even
as it leaped about the scale, it was
monotone at the core, a hollowed thing
that couldn’t know a feeling.
I tried to mimic this hollow whistle,
but I found myself unable to copy the
doctor’s trill—when I put my lips
together to blow, I could only sputter.
Uncle saw this mishap and smiled. It
was an amused expression that might
have seemed harmless to an outsider, but
the arc of